Over a century ago Washington laid the corner stone of
the Capitol in what was then little more than a tract of
wooded wilderness here beside the Potomac. We now find
it necessary to provide by great additional buildings for
the business of the government.

This growth in the need for the housing of the government
is but a proof and example of the way in which the nation
has grown and the sphere of action of the national government
has grown. We now administer the affairs of a nation in
which the extraordinary growth of population has been outstripped
by the growth of wealth in complex interests. The material
problems that face us today are not such as they were in
Washington's time, but the underlying facts of human nature
are the same now as they were then. Under altered external
form we war with the same tendencies toward evil that were
evident in Washington's time, and are helped by the same
tendencies for good. It is about some of these that I wish
to say a word today.

In Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" you
may recall the description of the Man with the Muck Rake,
the man who could look no way but downward, with the
muck rake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown
for his muck rake, but who would neither look up nor
regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake
to himself the filth of the floor.

In "Pilgrim's Progress" the
Man with the Muck Rake is set forth as the example of
him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of spiritual
things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life
consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and
fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which
is vile and debasing.

Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from
seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the
floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck rake; and
there are times and places where this service is the most
needed of all the services that can be performed. But the
man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks
or writes, save of his feats with the muck rake, speedily
becomes, not a help but one of the most potent forces for
evil.

There are in the body politic, economic and social, many
and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the
sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure
of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or
business man, every evil practice, whether in politics,
business, or social life. I hail as a benefactor every
writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform or in
a book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity
makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn
remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely
truthful.

The liar is no whit better than the thief, and if his
mendacity takes the form of slander he may be worse than
most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully
to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration
to assail a bad man with untruth.

An epidemic of indiscriminate assault upon character does
no good, but very great harm. The soul of every scoundrel
is gladdened whenever an honest man is assailed, or even
when a scoundrel is untruthfully assailed.

Now, it is easy to twist out of shape what I have just
said, easy to affect to misunderstand it, and if it is
slurred over in repetition not difficult really to misunderstand
it. Some persons are sincerely incapable of understanding
that to denounce mud slinging does not mean the endorsement
of whitewashing; and both the interested individuals who
need whitewashing and those others who practice mud slinging
like to encourage such confusion of ideas.

One of the chief counts against those who make indiscriminate
assault upon men in business or men in public life is that
they invite a reaction which is sure to tell powerfully
in favor of the unscrupulous scoundrel who really ought
to be attacked, who ought to be exposed, who ought, if
possible, to be put in the penitentiary. If Aristides is
praised overmuch as just, people get tired of hearing it;
and overcensure of the unjust finally and from similar
reasons results in their favor.

Any excess is almost sure to invite a reaction; and, unfortunately,
the reactions instead of taking the form of punishment
of those guilty of the excess, is apt to take the form
either of punishment of the unoffending or of giving immunity,
and even strength, to offenders. The effort to make financial
or political profit out of the destruction of character
can only result in public calamity. Gross and reckless
assaults on character, whether on the stump or in newspaper,
magazine, or book, create a morbid and vicious public sentiment,
and at the same time act as a profound deterrent to able
men of normal sensitiveness and tend to prevent them from
entering the public service at any price.

As an instance in point, I may mention that one serious
difficulty encountered in getting the right type of men
to dig the Panama canal is the certainty that they will
be exposed, both without, and, I am sorry to say, sometimes
within, Congress, to utterly reckless assaults on their
character and capacity.

At the risk of repetition let me say again that my plea
is not for immunity to, but for the most unsparing exposure
of, the politician who betrays his trust, of the big business
man who makes or spends his fortune in illegitimate or
corrupt ways. There should be a resolute effort to hunt
every such man out of the position he has disgraced. Expose
the crime, and hunt down the criminal; but remember that
even in the case of crime, if it is attacked in sensational,
lurid, and untruthful fashion, the attack may do more damage
to the public mind than the crime itself.

It is because I feel that there should be no rest in the
endless war against the forces of evil that I ask the war
be conducted with sanity as well as with resolution. The
men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the
well being of society; but only if they know when to stop
raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown
above them, to the crown of worthy endeavor. There are
beautiful things above and round about them; and if they
gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing
but muck, their power of usefulness is gone.

If the whole picture is painted black there remains no
hue whereby to single out the rascals for distinction from
their fellows. Such painting finally induces a kind of
moral color blindness; and people affected by it come to
the conclusion that no man is really black, and no man
really white, but they are all gray.

In other words, they neither believe in the truth of the
attack, nor in the honesty of the man who is attacked;
they grow as suspicious of the accusation as of the offense;
it becomes well nigh hopeless to stir them either to wrath
against wrongdoing or to enthusiasm for what is right;
and such a mental attitude in the public gives hope to
every knave, and is the despair of honest men. To assail
the great and admitted evils of our political and industrial
life with such crude and sweeping generalizations as to
include decent men in the general condemnation means the
searing of the public con science. There results a general
attitude either of cynical belief in and indifference to
public corruption or else of a distrustful inability to
discriminate between the good and the bad. Either attitude
is fraught with untold damage to the country as a whole.

The fool who has not sense to discriminate between what
is good and what is bad is well nigh as dangerous as the
man who does discriminate and yet chooses the bad. There
is nothing more distressing to every good patriot, to every
good American, than the hard, scoffing spirit which treats
the allegation of dishonesty in a public man as a cause
for laughter. Such laughter is worse than the crackling
of thorns under a pot, for it denotes not merely the vacant
mind, but the heart in which high emotions have been choked
before they could grow to fruition. There is any amount
of good in the world, and there never was a time when loftier
and more disinterested work for the betterment of mankind
was being done than now. The forces that tend for evil
are great and terrible, but the forces of truth and love
and courage and honesty and generosity and sympathy are
also stronger than ever before. It is a foolish and timid,
no less than a wicked thing, to blink the fact that the
forces of evil are strong, but it is even worse to fail
to take into account the strength of the forces that tell
for good.

Hysterical sensationalism is the poorest weapon wherewith
to fight for lasting righteousness. The men who with stern
sobriety and truth assail the many evils of our time, whether
in the public press, or in magazines, or in books, are
the leaders and allies of all engaged in the work for social
and political betterment. But if they give good reason
for distrust of what they say, if they chill the ardor
of those who demand truth as a primary virtue, they thereby
betray the good cause and play into the hands of the very
men against whom they are nominally at war.

In his Ecclesiastical Polity that fine old Elizabethan
divine, Bishop Hooker, wrote:

He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they
are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never
want attentive and favorable hearers, because they know
the manifold defects whereunto every kind of regimen is
subject, but the secret lets and difficulties, which in
public proceedings are innumerable and inevitable, they
have not ordinarily the judgment to consider. This truth
should be kept constantly in mind by every free people
desiring to preserve the sanity and poise indispensable
to the permanent success of self-government. Yet, on the
other hand, it is vital not to permit this spirit of sanity
and self-command to degenerate into mere mental stagnation.
Bad though a state of hysterical excitement is, and evil
though the results are which come from the violent oscillations
such excitement invariably produces, yet a sodden acquiescence
in evil is even worse.

At this moment we are passing through a period of great
unrest-social, political, and industrial unrest. It is
of the utmost importance for our future that this should
prove to be not the unrest of mere rebelliousness against
life, of mere dissatisfaction with the inevitable inequality
of conditions, but the unrest of a resolute and eager ambition
to secure the betterment of the individual and the nation.

So far as this movement of agitation throughout the country
takes the form of a fierce discontent with evil, of a determination
to punish the authors of evil, whether in industry or politics,
the feeling is to be heartily welcomed as a sign of healthy
life.

If, on the other hand,
it turns into a mere crusade of appetite against appetite,
of a contest between the brutal greed of the "have nots" and the brutal greed
of the "haves," then it has no significance for
good, but only for evil. If it seeks to establish a line
of cleavage, not along the line which divides good men
from bad, but along that other line, running at right angles
thereto, which divides those who are well off from those
who are less well off, then it will be fraught with immeasurable
harm to the body politic.

We can no more and no less afford to condone evil in the
man of capital than evil in the man of no capital. The
wealthy man who exults because there is a failure of justice
in the effort to bring some trust magnate to account for
his misdeeds is as bad as, and no worse than, the so-called
labor leader who clamorously strives to excite a foul class
feeling on behalf of some other labor leader who is implicated
in murder. One attitude is as bad as the other, and no
worse; in each case the accused is entitled to exact justice;
and in neither case is there need of action by others which
can be construed into an expression of sympathy for crime.

It is a prime necessity that if the present unrest is
to result in permanent good the emotion shall be translated
into action, and that the action shall be marked by honesty,
sanity, and self-restraint. There is mighty little good
in a mere spasm of reform. The reform that counts is that
which comes through steady, continuous growth; violent
emotionalism leads to exhaustion.

It is important to this people to grapple with the problems
connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes, and the
use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in
business. We should discriminate in the sharpest way between
fortunes well won and fortunes ill won; between those gained
as an incident to performing great services to the community
as a whole and those gained in evil fashion by keeping
just within the limits of mere law honesty. Of course,
no amount of charity in spending such fortunes in any way
compensates for misconduct in making them.

As a matter of personal conviction, and without pretending
to discuss the details or formulate the system, I feel
that we shall ultimately have to consider the adoption
of some such scheme as that of a progressive tax on all
fortunes, beyond a certain amount, either given in life
or devised or bequeathed upon death to any individual-a
tax so framed as to put it out of the power of the owner
of one of these enormous fortunes to hand on more than
a certain amount to any one individual; the tax of course,
to be imposed by the national and not the state government.
Such taxation should, of course, be aimed merely at the
inheritance or transmission in their entirety of those
fortunes swollen beyond all healthy limits. Again, the
national government must in some form exercise supervision
over corporations engaged in interstate business-and all
large corporations engaged in interstate business-whether
by license or otherwise, so as to permit us to deal with
the far reaching evils of overcapitalization.

This year we are making a beginning in the direction of
serious effort to settle some of these economic problems
by the railway rate legislation. Such legislation, if so
framed, as I am sure it will be, as to secure definite
and tangible results, will amount to something of itself;
and it will amount to a great deal more in so far as it
is taken as a first step in the direction of a policy of
superintendence and control over corporate wealth engaged
in interstate commerce; this superintendence and control
not to be exercised in a spirit of malevolence toward the
men who have created the wealth, but with the firm purpose
both to do justice to them and to see that they in their
turn do justice to the public at large.

The first requisite in the public servants who are to
deal in this shape with corporations, whether as legislators
or as executives, is honesty. This honesty can be no respecter
of persons. There can be no such thing as unilateral honesty.
The danger is not really from corrupt corporations; it
springs from the corruption itself, whether exercised for
or against corporations.

The eighth commandment
reads, "Thou shalt not steal." It
does not read, "Thou shalt not steal from the rich
man." It does not read, "Thou shalt not steal
from the poor man." It reads simply and plainly, "Thou
shalt not steal."

No good whatever will come from that warped and mock morality
which denounces the misdeeds of men of wealth and forgets
the misdeeds practiced at their expense; which denounces
bribery, but blinds itself to blackmail; which foams with
rage if a corporation secures favors by improper methods,
and merely leers with hideous mirth if the corporation
is itself wronged.

The only public servant who can be trusted honestly to
protect the rights of the public against the misdeeds of
a corporation is that public man who will just as surely
protect the corporation itself from wrongful aggression
.

If a public man is willing to yield to popular clamor
and do wrong to the men of wealth or to rich corporations,
it may be set down as certain that if the opportunity comes
he will secretly and furtively do wrong to the public in
the interest of a corporation.

But in addition to honesty, we need sanity. No honesty
will make a public man useful if that man is timid or foolish,
if he is a hot-headed zealot or an impracticable visionary.
As we strive for reform we find that it is not at all merely
the case of a long uphill pull. On the contrary, there
is almost as much of breeching work as of collar work.
To depend only on traces means that there will soon be
a runaway and an upset.

The men of wealth who today are trying to prevent the
regulation and control of their business in the interest
of the public by the proper government authorities will
not succeed, in my judgment, in checking the progress of
the movement. But if they did succeed they would find that
they had sown the wind and would surely reap the whirlwind,
for they would ultimately provoke the violent excesses
which accompany a reform coming by convulsion instead of
by steady and natural growth.

On the other hand, the wild preachers of unrest and discontent,
the wild agitators against the entire existing order, the
men who act crookedly, whether because of sinister design
or from mere puzzle headedness, the men who preach destruction
without proposing any substitute for what they intend to
destroy, or who propose a substitute which would be far
worse than the existing evils-all these men are the most
dangerous opponents of real reform. If they get their way
they will lead the people into a deeper pit than any into
which they could fall under the present system. If they
fail to get their way they will still do incalculable harm
by provoking the kind of reaction which in its revolt against
the senseless evil of their teaching would enthrone more
securely than ever the evils which their misguided followers
believe they are attacking.

More important than aught else is the development of the
broadest sympathy of man for man. The welfare of the wage
worker, the welfare of the tiller of the soil, upon these
depend the welfare of the entire country; their good is
not to be sought in pulling down others; but their good
must be the prime object of all our statesmanship.

Materially we must strive to secure a broader economic
opportunity for all men, so that each shall have a better
chance to show the stuff of which he is made. Spiritually
and ethically we must strive to bring about clean living
and right thinking. We appreciate that the things of the
body are important; but we appreciate also that the things
of the soul are immeasurably more important.

The foundation stone of national life is, and ever must
be, the high individual character of the average citizen.